In 2004, Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan was updated to the 1930s as A Good Woman, starring Helen Hunt and Scarlett Johansson as the mysterious Mrs Erlynne and the naive young Lady Windermere. Oddly enough, Otto Preminger's brief, fascinating 1949 film The Fan, though set in the 1890s, is a more radical version, stressing the melodramatic over the comic. Starring Jeanne Crain (the only American in the cast) as Lady Windermere, it unfolds in flashback from a meeting in 1948 in London between the now elderly seducer Lord Darlington (George Sanders, who played Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray), and the 90-year-old Mrs Erlynne (Madeleine Carroll's final screen appearance). Preminger disliked the film and it was a box-office failure, but his biographer Foster Hirsch, in an essay accompanying this disc, argues the case for it being an important and characteristic work. The disc also contains Fred Paul's hour-long 1916 version of the play.